Monday,11,2019

Formerly of the University of Calcutta.
Interviewed by Dr Paromita Chakravarti, Sri Abhishek Sarkar and Sri Subhankar Bhattacharya.

I was disappointed with Suman Mukhopadhyay’s production of King Lear. I found it formulaic and conventional. In the text, one can discern a struggle for power. Lear does not want to relinquish his absolutism. The other characters may profess individualism but are moving towards absolute power. Goneril and Regan did not keep their word, nor did Cordelia. She had said that she would give half her love, care and duty to her husband after she got married. But in the end, she moved completely towards her father. The tussle that started between absolutism and relativism was never resolved. I have never found any critic mentioning how Cordelia went back on her own word. There was a huge elevation of Cordelia at the end whereas she was highly practical and pragmatic. The end becomes highly idealistic.

Another feature that strikes me is the absentee mother in Shakespeare’s plays. Lear in old age, when driven out by his daughters, has no wife to turn to. When we think about this absence of old women on stage, one may partly attribute it to the stage convention of the time. Boy actors played female parts and hence a Portia could be represented but depicting aged women was tough. Another feature that interests me is Lear’s encounter with unaccomodated man in the Bedlam figure. Bradley and other critics have said how he comes face to face with essential humanity. Lear is said to have recognized humanity. But the question that strikes me is about this ‘essential man’. Who is he? The Bedlam beggar is actually a nobleman in disguise and an aristocrat. Lear regards him as the unaccommodated man and thus moves from one illusion to another. He never comes face to face with the common man. Lear’s redemption is on an idealistic plane. In the end when he dies, it is not clear whether he dies in knowledge of Cordelia’s death or under the illusion that Cordelia is still alive.

Jyoti Bhattacharya had performed two scenes of King Lear for Calcutta university. That was very powerful. His physical stature, vice and body language were eminently suited for the role of King Lear. Soumitra Chatterjee’s voice is sweet and thin. He does not suit the part of Lear who needs to look rough and rugged. W. B. Yeats had talked about this aspect of the mad Lear. Lear is talking about absolute monarchy. He tells Kent not to come between the dragon and his wrath. The character has to exude a dragon-like appeal which did not come through in the Soumitra Chatterjee’s version.

Could you tell us something about your student days?
I was a student of a Bengali medium school and in our syllabus there was no Shakespeare. I passed my school finals in 1959. In college, we were the last I.A. batch. Again, there was no Shakespeare. We first encountered Shakespeare at the Honours level. At the end of our term at Presidency College, something very significant happened. That was the first rebellion staged by us against the authorities of Presidency College. The Naxalite movement would start soon. In I.A. class, we were very young and would wear half-pants. We used to have the Civics exam - a combination of Economics and Political Science. A few of my friends said that we had a very difficult question paper covering areas that had not been taught in class. We wanted the paper-setter to be called to the examination hall. The invigilator told us that this wasn’t possible. All of us walked out of the examination hall in protest. This was 1961. We went to the Coffee House and started having coffee. Some boys had crept back and taken the examination. When we went to college in the evening, we saw a long list, with all our names on it, saying that those on the list were debarred from studying Honours at Presidency College. A meeting had been called immediately and the decision had been taken. We thought that they would not be able to stop us if we fared well in the examinations. I got a First Division scholarship along with many of my friends. None of our names featured in the admission list. The admission for all colleges had stopped. I went with my elder brother to Maulana Azad College. The principal asked me why I had come to Maulana Azad College despite doing so well and not gone to Presidency. He was reluctant to admit me after hearing what really had happened. I had to fall at his feet to request him to consider my case sympathetically. It was thus that Arup Mallick, who later became a famous professor in the Department of Economics, Calcutta University, and I moved to Maulana Azad.

It was a blessing in disguise as I got the chance to be taught by Bishnu Dey and Tarak Sen [Prof. Tarak Nath Sen]. It was a great advantage. I could attend Tarak Sen’s classes at Presidency. Prof. Ashok Kumar Mukherjee had recently joined Maulana Azad College after returning from Oxford. His father Tarapada Mukherjee was still teaching at Presidency. I had gone to Presidency to receive the medal for getting the highest marks in Bengali in I.A. when AKM saw me. I had wanted to study Bengali. My elder brother was very good in English and was well regarded because of it. AKM asked me why I was receiving a medal at Presidency. He was sorry to know that I was not admitted to the Honours class at Presidency. He said he would write to Tarak Sen so that I could audit his classes. He said he would give me the [attendance] percentage for his class. I would regularly attend TN Sen’s classes. The students of Presidency forgot that I did not belong there. I got the best of both the worlds. I developed an unbiased perception of these two colleges because I really didn’t belong anywhere. However, I did not develop any attachment to Maulana Azad.

Tarak Sen was the greatest teacher of Shakespeare in his time. He was extremely meticulous in terms of scholarship. He would discuss the historical and cultural background, sculpture, music, Elizabethean stage, performance and bring them all together in his teaching. He believed in close reading of the text and would go line by line explaining the etymological meaning of words, their grammatical and contextual meaning. He would also question his students in class. Students would invariably fumble. He had an awe-inspiring presence. He had never asked me any question because I happened to be an outsider. I would feel a bit disappointed by this.

When Bishnu Dey was teaching us, he was an established poet. Even the Urdu-speaking students in Maulana Azad College had heard of him as a poet. Bishnu Dey used to teach Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He had Grecian features and we loved the way he walked. He had his own sense of humour. Shakespeare’s bawdy words, which caused quite a stir in the Victorian age and were Bowdlerized, were regularly explained in class by him. He used to explain the meaning of words like codpiece and had no inhibitions about it. Tarak Sen was not very comfortable discussing this and would evade such terms. His attitude was rather Victorian. Tarak Sen would concentrate on the words he wanted to discuss. Those words were always explained in the notes. The Arden edition does not have too much of that. They usually rely on cross-references to older editions. Tarak Sen recommended the Arden edition in class. Tarak Sen used to mention Bengali literature in connection with Shakespeare sometimes. He told us to read Arup Ratan. This was a specific reference in relation to Hamlet.

Students would marvel at Tarak Sen’s classes and his manner of interpretation. I think, he was rather overrated. It so happened that one day Bishnu Dey told us the Elizabethean meaning of the word ‘humour’ and how these physical elements would bring about temperamental differences. The Verity edition had a note at the back explaining the provenance of the word. We could have read it and found out for ourselves. In Presidency, Tarak-babu decided to talk about humours that day. Students came out of his class and were marvelling at his lecture. This could be found in any dictionary. It would not do to give Tarak-babu undue credit for this. We used to hear how Bishnu Dey was the example of the bad teacher and Tarak-babu the successful teacher. The greatness of Tarak Sen does not lie merely in this kind of scholarship. This was scholarship of a commonplace kind. Tarak-babu had a holistic approach. He would cover all the aspects of a text and teach Hamlet for two years instead of the apportioned six months. All the other professors were obligated to finish texts in the stipulated period. Tarak-babu was an exception. He would take classes in the library cubicle as he could not climb the stairs because of a breathing problem. He would come very late and would leave us very late. Tarak Sen always had the privilege of being an exception.

He would proceed very slowly and was very soft spoken, like Arun Kumar Dasgupta later. In the BA class, we had Hamlet and probably As You Like It. For the MA, we had an entire paper on Shakespeare. The first paper was on the background and in the second part, we concentrated on four texts. Shakespeare was given a lot of importance at the MA level. We were taught by Professors Amalendu Bose, Sreechandra Sen (Prof. Dineshchandra Sen’s son and the poet Samar Sen’s uncle). I joined Visva-Bharati in 1966. I taught there for two years till Amalendu Bose got me to CU in 1968.

Tarak-babu had advised us to join Jadavpur for MA. Prof. S. C. Sengupta was the HOD of English at Jadavpur at that time. TN Sen used to take postgraduate classes in Presidency but he boycotted our batch because we did not do his bidding. We missed him a lot. For the MA class at CU, I can’t remember any teacher who is worth remembering. They could not create any interest in the author.

Amalendu Bose’s approach was anecdotal. He would talk about seminars and conferences he had attended on Shakespeare and what other scholars had to say about Shakespeare. He would often go on a tangent. I used to enjoy it because I would find it lively, not dry-as-dust scholarship. Jyoti Bhattacharya never taught us Shakespeare. After we joined, he was working for the United Front. When we were studying MA, he came in to teach right at the end. Only a few minor texts were then left. He did not want to teach them. We loved Jyoti-babu’s performance, his entry and exit were very dramatic. He was known as the Uttam Kumar of the academia. Later, he would teach King Lear over a long stretch of time, just like Tarak-babu’s Hamlet. Tarak Sen had written an article on the short lines of Shakespeare. Jyoti Bhattacharya wrote an essay on the last four lines of King Lear. He maintained a long correspondence with Kenneth Muir.

Jyoti Bhattacharya would perform in class in the P.C. Ghosh [Prof. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh] style. It is reported that when P.C. Ghosh taught Hamlet, he would change his voice according to the character. He would play both Hamlet and Ophelia. Jyoti Bhattacharya would present a dramatized reading, but he did not enact the characters. When we were studying MA, he had performed two scenes from a play and we students had performed two scenes from Much Ado about Nothing. This was for the three day reunion in the University Institute Hall. For Much Ado about Nothing, I played Balthazar who was a court singer. Jyoti Bhattacharya had set my lines to music. In our batch, there was no male singer except me. I told him that I did not know the original tune and he promised to teach me. He took me to an empty classroom, closed the door and made me sit. Then he sang the tune to me. I used to practise the lines he gave me on the terrace of my house. One day when I was rehearsing the song in this manner our maid-servant got frightened and raised an alarm, thinking that I had a sudden seizure or something. Jyoti-babu had not kept any notation and when he told me to sing to him next time, he had forgotten the tune himself. I could not argue with him so I followed his instructions. I practised the tune at home. He gave me a new tune the third time. I had a friend called Debjani from Loreto College who told me I was getting very nervous. She told me to insert four fingers into my mouth to open it adequately and throw my voice out. In the end, I decided I would not object to any change in the tonal structure. I decided on the final day to sing my own song. They had not given me any musical instrument. A court singer needed an accompaniment like a mandolin. From the wings I saw Amalendu Bose who was sitting with an Englishman. I felt very nervous to sing the song before Amalendu babu’s guest. Later, I got to know that he worked for Oxford University Press.

Jyoti-babu would encourage us to act in plays. To teach that required a different approach. The teacher coming to the classroom and interpreting King Lear did not allow us any scope for performance. To bring that out, the teacher should engage in play-reading with the students. Play reading is a kind of performance and something that is possible in the confines of a classroom. I have done play reading while teaching Doctor Faustus. I wish a Shakespeare play could be performed every year. The reunion took place several times but Shakespeare was never performed. Performing Shakespeare is difficult and so is memorizing blank verse.

Jyoti Bhattacharya’s style of teaching had a dramatic and theatrical quality about it. He was a real performer. The rest of the teachers taught Shakespeare in a very conventional manner and mentioned what the Western critics had said, doing some routine name-dropping. Projecting Shakespeare as a theatrical personality was not the aim of the academics who had framed the syllabus and controlled the power structure of the university. Shakespeare was treated as part of English Literature, not theatre. I would always tell my students that Shakespeare did not write for them but for the spectators and theatregoers. Shakespeare himself was a man of the theatre. He was not very learned and had studied very little. I remember on World Book Day, which is also Shakespeare’s birthday, I was asked to speak on Shakespeare in Rabindra Sadan when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the Chief Minister. It was in the presence of Asit Bandyopadhyay and publishers. I got up and asked why is World Book Day was on Shakespeare’s birthday. From what we know, Shakespeare was not particularly studious. Why is the World Book Day not in Milton’s name who was the most learned English poet? The answer lay with the publishers, since Milton’s scholarship notwithstanding, Shakespeare’s books sold the most.

Shakespeare does not enjoy the same place in modern theory. In England, Shakespeare’s canonical status is being challenged. New critics are coming up with new theories. In the theatre Shakespeare has been broken, mangled and reshaped from Bertolt Brecht to Peter Brook and others. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee called me and said that he had read A. C. Bradley in his time and was surprised by my speech.

In class, I would occasionally refer to recent criticism and theories. Mostly I would gather information from the text myself, looking at it from different perspectives. I used to encourage my students to watch Shakespeare productions. Utpal Dutt was famous for his Shakespeare productions. Later on, my former student Ananda Lal directed Shakespeare’s plays at Jadavpur University. More recently, Bibhas Chakrabarty has directed Hamlet and Suman Mukhopadhyay has directed Raja Lear.

I tried to create an impression of Shakespeare’s stage and audience. These were on the syllabus. Shakespeare’s audience comprised the kind of people who watch jatra today. The impression that Shakespeare was a playwright for the gentlemen is a myth. Shakespeare never wrote for the aristocrats. They would come with the Queen but it was a mixed gathering. It was total chaos with people throwing eggshells, like what happens in jatras today. Many business transactions would happen during the performance. I would keep reminding the students of the scenario.

Granville-Barker tried to produce Shakespeare on an adapted form of the typical Elizabethean stage. He showed how Shakespeare is best appreciated if he is produced in terms of Elizabethean stage conventions. But I don’t agree. I am not a man of Shakespeare’s age. There is no evidence of productions in Shakespeare’s time. Whatever a few diaries [of Shakespeare’s time] tell us ultimately mean nothing. One should strive to make Shakespeare as contemporary as possible. To me, Jan Kott’s Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is more relevant than Granville-Barker. Jan Kott looks at Shakespeare from a political point of view. Shakespeare has to be made contemporary according to the specific culture, time and age. I used to suggest ways in which Shakespeare could be contemporized.

But the problem was such that these new approaches to Shakespeare in the classroom could not be incorporated in the question paper. Never has there been a question on how one would like to produce a particular play by Shakespeare on stage. All the teachers see Shakespeare from a literary point of view, ignoring the performance angle. Shakespeare productions would not take place in ur department. I have adapted other plays in Bengali, not English. Shanta Mahalanobis would direct the plays in English. P. Lal [Prof. Purushottam Lal] used to teach briefly at the University of Calcutta, like his son Ananda Lal did later. P. Lal had objected to an English department producing Bengali plays and had raised the point in Bethune College. I did not agree to his view that an English department must perform only English plays. Answers in examination scripts were to be in English, but that need not be applied to everything. In England, those who were studying French literature watched English plays. There is no use persisting with this linguistic bias.

I had produced two short plays with Anjan Dutt and Sudakshina. Mrinal Sen was in the audience. He was impressed with Anjan Dutt’s performances and told Anjan Dutt to meet him. That is how Anjan Dutt’s film career started. After this play, there was a letter in The Statesman asking why the English department was producing Bengali plays. One of our students named Sandip Mukherjee had replied to that letter defending our decision. The plays were often Bengali adaptations of English or European originals. P. Lal had not anticipated that there would be the advent of postcolonialism in the academic where the importance of the mother tongue would increase dramatically. Indian memsahibs have now started learning the Bornoporichoy [a Bengali primer written by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar] all over again.

Frankly, I did not have the courage to direct a Shakespeare play. Our department was not too friendly towards such initiatives. One needs monetary input, time, and space in the form of an auditorium. In Calcutta University, there are two sections with 120 or 130 students in each. In this difficult situation, staging Shakespeare was not feasible. I would choose a play of short duration, usually 30-45 minutes long. I used to help the students rehearse and stage it. My last production was Antigone. Anjan Dutt was the playwright. His wife Chhanda played Antigone. The production was not good enough, as the team could not perform well.

I did not attempt Shakespeare also because I did not teach Shakespeare’s plays at that time. I taught Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. After I came to teach Shakespeare no reunions were held. I was quite old by that time and could not find the time or energy to put a play together. I had given the students an idea. There was a film called Shakespeare in Love. I had suggested that they attempt a piece on ‘Love in Shakespeare’. It would be a collage of the different love scenes in Shakespeare. The students were very interested but the play did not take off.

Could you tell us something about your experience of teaching Shakespeare?
I got to teach Shakespeare at the University of Calcutta when all the senior teachers had retired. I had no choice. I got a good response from my students when I started teaching after Professors Jyoti Bhattacharya and Arun Kumar Dasgupta retired. I used to provide new insights into the plays.

I used to teach King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. I taught Antony and Cleopatra from a postcolonial perspective. I talked to the students about othering. Egypt was the Orient and Rome stood for the West, the Occident. From the Roman viewpoint, the Egyptians were barbaric. They associated everything exotic with Cleopatra. One approach was postcolonial, the other was from gender studies. Cleopatra is a woman who is the head of state. This was something the women in Rome would not be able to accept. They would rebel against this. Cleopatra therefore was a kind of witch. I used to teach Antony and Cleopatra from these two perspectives. Antony is a self-serving scheming opportunist. He holds Cleopatra responsible for all the debacles. He professes love to her and vows never to leave her, but he does and blames her for every misfortune that befalls him, including his suicide. Cleopatra sells her body and that is how she beats the menfolk at their own game. She uses her body to keep the enemy nations at bay as she did not have the advantage of a large army in her small state. Cleopatra is taken to be the paradigm of the bewitching feminine beauty but she is also a soldier. Critics do not concentrate on this aspect of her character and ignore her militancy. Shakespeare has brought out her majesty in her final scene when she asks for her royal robes. She wanted to die dressed as a queen so that Caesar could come and see her in that state. At the same time, she hits the messenger when he comes to inform her of Antony’s marriage. Enobarbus describes her as lying Venus-like in the barge causing the elements to fall in love with her. That same Cleopatra gets down to the market and starts hopping in the mud. From that sublime image, there is a descent to earth. This huge range is captured in the play. Enobarbus was half in love with Cleopatra. He was Antony’s friend and so could not pursue her. Enobarbus did not approve of Cleopatra becoming a soldier. Enobarbus ultimately deserted Antony and joined the Caesar camp. He eventually committed suicide. Cleopatra’s strength as a ruler has not been emphasized enough. Cleopatra as a woman has been negatively represented by Occidental culture. In the end, love triumphs over politics. This was a typical theme in our question papers – “Show how love triumphs over politics”. Love itself is a kind of politics. The two cannot be clearly separated. She demonstrates her love to Antony by committing suicide but also foils Caesar’s plans of taking her in as a captive queen. This is extraordinary!

I used to refer to Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Shaw presented a young Cleopatra. Her brother was seated on the throne. She meets Caesar who teaches her the dynamics of capturing power. Ceasar the autocrat is a tutor for Cleopatra. Cleopatra is preparing herself accordingly. In the end, the play goes in a different direction, but this grooming of Cleopatra as a politician and ruler is significant. Shaw presents Caesar as a great statesman while Shakespeare presents him as an old and defeated coward. Shakespeare presented a bipolar world where both Egypt and Rome were significant. Scenes shift between the two locales. This is a wonderful structure. Danby has said that there is a cinematic aspect to this multi-centeredness. The short battle scenes switch rapidly from one to the other and would require rapid adjustment of spotlights. Shakespeare has not done this in any other play. It is clear that Shakespeare was experimenting with his dramatic structure. This bipolar world with two centres and two adult married politicians was idealized by the Romantic critics. Till the end, Shakespeare left his play highly ambiguous. Antony and Cleopatra both betray each other. There is a lot of double meaning in the language, as in Tagore’s Shyama.

Love is problematized in the play. We ask ourselves whether this is love at all. Cleopatra is not easy to like. She does not care for love and is very calculating. She lies and sends one messenger after another to Rome for news of Antony, wanting to know how he is and how he is sitting on his horse. When Charmian and Iras ask her how many messengers she plans to send, she replies that she will empty Egypt. Shakespeare took a lot of information from Plutarch and added a little, including Cleopatra’s pining for Antony. The Roman view of Cleopatra is there in the play. What Shakespeare added was the last scene where she says she has immortal longings in her. Her asking for her dress is a brilliant piece of theatre because an important part of theatre is role changing which involves a change of costume. Changing costume and dressing onstage will dramatize the process of theatrical change. We have seen Cleopatra in many guises and we see her dressing up as a real queen. This ironically happens when she is going to die. She would die as a queen. This is an extraordinary moment in theatre. The Hollywood version with Liz Taylor seems so shallow when placed beside Shakespeare’s play! Cleopatra was an extremely clever and wily woman. Enobarbus’s famous description of Cleopatra where he reports her as having “infinite variety” is striking. It is impossible to represent infinite variety on stage. It has to be limited all the time. Shakespeare has brought out only two or three aspects. Enobarbus’s emotional recounting of Cleopatra’s virtues tries to depict in language his admiration for her. All of “infinite variety” cannot be represented onstage but a few scenes where she changes her roles can help the audience gauge her potential.

Discussing the play in this manner would bring out the performance angle. The first scene of King Lear is a play-within-a-play. It has been stage managed and the script prepared in advance. Lear has said that he has decided on his course of action. That will be presented formally before the people. That script is challenged completely by Cordelia which Lear had not envisioned. She must have told him indoors that she would obey his bidding. But she disobeys him in court. This serious and forbidding atmosphere in court is where Lear asks his daughters how much they love him. He comes to his youngest daughter where she says ‘according to my bond’. The play within a play is being watched by the courtiers. The audience of the play is watching the entire action. So there is a two tiered audience. Critics don’t refer to it as a play-within-a-play. The most arresting part of the play is the opening scene. A lot is said in the first scene itself.

When we speak of the play within the play, we think of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. It is much like a Bollywood film. Good entertainment should have some stock ingredients like suspense, love, emotion. Shakespeare derived a lot of his play-within-the-play from Kyd and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy set the template for Hamlet. There are many similarities between Heironimo and Hamlet. But in The Spanish Tragedy, the play-within-the-play is at the end of the play. The solutions happen there. Ultimate action is taken in the play-within-the-play. Shakespeare brought that into Hamlet, but in the middle of the play. A group of travelling players are asked to perform ‘to catch the conscience of the king’. Hamlet will judge whether the king is guilty from his facial expressions. A group of travelling players are hired and Hamlet’s sole objective is to watch his uncle’s reaction. In The Spanish Tragedy, the element of investigation is strong. After stabbing the enemies, Heironimo explains himself to the audience. The play-within-the-play is used differently by Shakespeare and Kyd. For Shakespeare, it is a device absolutely necessary for a sceptical hero like Hamlet. He does not believe what the ghost tells him and he seeks further evidence. Hamlet gives directions to the players. He tells them how to perform and from that it is clear what kind of performance Shakespeare himself liked. ‘To catch the conscience of the king’ takes Hamlet a lot of time and is related to the motif of procrastination in Hamlet. It is said that Hamlet suffers from melancholia and is not a man of action. He misses so many opportunities. Hamlet is a student and very intelligent and philosophical. He must collect enough evidence to vindicate his position. He would not act before that and do anything rash. This has come from The Spanish Tragedy where Heironimo waits and waits, the motif of delay comes from there. When he is rehearsing the play with Bel-Imperia it is decided what part each will perform. In the final moment, the murder in the play-within-the-play becomes the actual murder. Of the two plays, Kyd’s is more effective in theatrical terms. When Lorenzo and Balthazar are killed, the audience claps because they don’t understand that an actual murder has taken place. In Hamlet, this is merely a device. Hamlet does not act even after that incident.

A.G. Stock was our Head of our Department before Amalendu Bose came in. She wrote a book on Pearl. She was a socialist. In a lecture, she made the point that Hamlet was not just a philosophical thinker who meditates, ruminates and lacks the very motive for action. She found that one-sided. That very Hamlet killed Laertes and Claudius with a sword. Hamlet has two sides – in one he was the artist and thinker with weak nerves and in the other he was preparing himself for action. He pulls a trick on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This conspiracy where the King sends him on a ship and he gets the better of them is not the Hamlet of ‘to be or not to be’. My question is why he does not approach or arouse the people. Is it because people have no role to play in a monarchy?

In both Hamlet and King Lear, the king commits an offence and protest is registered but they don’t go to the people. The people could be alerted but that does not happen. Is it because of the system of monarchy, which does not owe anything to people? There is no reason to take a popular mandate where the people are a non-entity. The king is a divine agent whom the people are obliged to obey. Hamlet feels all of Denmark has gone rotten. Lear did not go to the people when he left the castle but took shelter from the storm in a hovel in a forest. He saw Edgar and the Bedlam beggar but did not want to see any more commoners. With Kent, the fool and the Bedlam beggar he entered the hovel. The hovel is like another cage. There are many cages in King Lear. In the end, he tells Cordelia that they would sing like birds in the cage. The concept of the cage is very important in Lear. Lear could never come out of the cage. He moved from one to the other. The question of the people comes up repeatedly in the history plays or in Coriolanus. In Kuznetsov’s version of King Lear, the people have a role. The film ends with the Fool sitting alone deserted. In the play, the Fool was hanged - it is not clear whether Lear is referring to Cordelia or his Fool.

If one produces Hamlet or Lear, one should look at it through the prism of contemporary sensibility. A meditative, introspective man steels his nerves through experience and gains mental and physical strength before he jumps to action. Hamlet is a hero even in the old sense. Hamlet is not someone in a meditative posture, like Rodin’s statue. The person whom Lear regards as ‘unaccomodated man’ is not unaccomodated in the least. Yet he is regarded as essential humanity. Disguise has played a very important role in Elizabethean dramaturgy.

The attempt to modernize Shakespeare is evident in modern dress adaptations. Adapting a play necessitates a lot of change which does not happen in translation. In the 19th century, most of the Shakespeare plays performed were adaptations like Bhanumati-Chittavilas Natak. There were not too many Shakespeare performances. A lot of other plays were being produced. It is a curious paradox that the Shakespeare we read in the classroom has never been presented onstage in a like manner. In Sadhabar Ekadasi a character called Nimchand used to quote Shakespeare off an on. Shakespeare was thus a quotable dramatist, not theatrical. The academic tradition remained stronger. During the Victorian era theatre was very weak until the arrival of Bernard Shaw.

Bishnu Dey was a good teacher but he was not very involved in teaching. He would make important observations and never indulged in name-dropping. His teaching was not always very impressive. Tarak Sen would go line by line, word by word meticulously. He would go for name dropping sometimes. I would go to Bishnu Dey’s house sometimes. There he never discussed academic matters but spoke of art and culture in general, mentioning the likes of Jamini Ray and Kamalkumar Majumdar. He was an authority on Rabindrasangeet. He was on the Akashvani board. His wife Pranati Dey, who taught at Jadavpur University, was the more vocal and assertive of the two. She would interrupt him and start speaking. He was very calm. Kalidas Bose taught me in the I.A. at Presidency. I used to stay at Kankulia Road while he stayed in Fern Road. S. C. Sengupta taught me in the I.A. class in Presidency. He was a very poor teacher and very unimpressive. However, he wrote well.

Srichandra Sen also taught us Shakespeare. He had a speech defect. He would gesticulate a lot. There was earlier a lot of talk about the greatness of writers, which has stopped after the advent of new theories. Shakespeare was described as “the greatest playwright of all time”, and after the statement had been made there would be a long, dramatic pause. The biographical approach to authors was very dominant. Since Shakespeare did not have an authorized biography, he was fortunately spared this approach. We were constantly referred to the life and we were directed from the (author’s) life to the text.

Kajal Sengupta and Shanta Mahalanobis directed a play. It was a Cuban play by Abelardo Estorino called Cain’s Mangoes. It was performed in the Department during the reunion. I played Abel. Sujada helped with the sets and the costumes for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. This was a communist and socialist text where the biblical story was being presented differently. Adam comes up at the end of the play and opening a dictionary, says, “Cain was a person who killed his brother”. Staging the play at that time was quite revolutionary.

Have you noticed any change in the students’ response to Shakespeare?
Definitely there has been a change in the response to Shakespeare. Students rely on guidebooks and reproduce them during the exam. I remember earlier students would follow the teacher to the classroom and ask him all manners of questions. When I started teaching Shakespeare, students would ask me questions too. There will always be a certain group of students who take genuine interest in Shakespeare. That has not changed. The average students come to class for the attendance percentage. So the response has changed not just to Shakespeare but to the entire academic system. Undergraduate colleges have students who are confused about entire texts. Shakespeare has been deglamorized. Gender and postcolonialism feature in the special papers. A lot of students are drawn to gender studies. A lot of PhD students are told that there is nothing new to be done on Shakespeare. Shakespeare can be studied in our own context or the absentee mother figure can generate new work. The fathers are very good in Shakespeare. Prospero brings Miranda up where the mother again is absent. Theory can be used differently for Shakespeare. The anti-canonical approach in the academia is reducing interest in the classics.

Which plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries were taught at that time?
Marlowe’s Edward II was taught at the undergraduate level and Doctor Faustus at the postgraduate level. Beaumont and Fletcher was also taught. Every Man In His Humour was later replaced by Volpone.

I have taught Faustus for many years. I used to compare Faustus with the Polish politician Lech Wałęsa. Faustus made a pact with the evil against God and realized too late that God had sent the evil to do his own work. This trajectory is similar to Wałęsa’s efforts of building Solidarity [the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union]. This is evident in the socialist bloc in Soviet Russia. Shakespeare has been used in very revolutionary ways in eastern Europe. Charles Marowitz, for example, has boldly experimented with Shakespeare. In general, England’s approach has been quite conservative.

Were the teachers particular about pronunciation?
Barring Jyoti Bhattacharya, nobody had good pronunciation. Among the ladies, one may mention Shanta Mahalanobis. She had a very good accent. Kajal-di [Prof. Kajal Sengupta] used to tell us that she had studied in Loreto and was confident about her pronunciation, but her relatives who were brought up in the West could not follow her English. A. G. Stock had said during her lecture that she had been out of touch with Indian English for a very long time and could no longer follow it. She in fact asked us to put down our questions on a slip of paper. The students of English medium schools were very angry at this. She was unable to distinguish between the accents used by Indian students. This was a matter of cultural perception. Now the emphasis on Received Pronunciation has gone. Conversations are routinely conducted in Indian English and no one feels any difference.

Shanta-di helped me a lot with my pronunciation. I picked it up very slowly. By the time I mastered it, postcolonialism had entered the academy and pronunciation ceased to matter anymore.